Some people are born knowing what they want to do with their lives. Or maybe they pursue a certain hobby for a life time and become master of that exercise. Perhaps you are a person like that, having known from the first grade that you wanted to write code, or fly hang-gliders, or play great Ma Jong. I am not one of those folks, and when I refer to myself as “jack of all, master of none,” I am playing loosely with the word all. But, I am full of admiration for those who have a single minded purpose that results in exceptional skill and accomplishment in their chosen field. When I opened the envelope that came last week bearing a handsome magazine, I didn’t know that Beloit Fiction Journal set out in 1985, to become “a pure fiction journal.” But I do now. Over the course of thirty concentrated years, BFJ has become exactly what its founders dreamed it would be.

Consistent with its name, Beloit Fiction Journal does only fiction and wow - does it do it well. The current edition is lovely and bears some provocative cover art: “Uranium Extraction Plant” courtesy of the artist Lori Nix and the Clamp Art Gallery in New York. The painting depicts a factory set on the edge of an ochre cliff complete with smokestack and brightly-lit, yet opaque, windows. Part way down the cliff are two outflow pipes spewing a ghastly green liquid. A neon pool sits at the base, on the edge of which is a deer just emerged from the forest, also glowing but nearly translucent. The cover art precisely describes the stories inside, where the terrible teeters over the beautiful, and pollutants leak into the lives of hopeful characters. The fiction in BFJ isn’t all bleak but many of these stories are full of grit and irony, betrayal and anomie. They are mostly set in the burbs, the ribcage around America’s bleak heart.

The contributors to this year’s edition all have significant publishing credits, except Rachel Groves, whose first published story, “Halfway House,” proves the editors’ assertion that they “are always interested in new writers as well as established writers.” Rachel should be proud because her story is in good company. In every respect, “Halfway House” measures up to the other pieces in the collection. The story is written from the perspective of a teenage girl whose brother has been institutionalized for depression and attempting suicide.

I worried briefly that the story might be recreating the long-gone TV show, Freaks and Geeks (Sorry- it’s what comes to mind when I see the word “Mathlete”), but Groves’s narrator genuinely sounds like a sixteen year-old in the center of a family falling apart: “I like being at Margo’s house, for the quiet, for the oppositeness to my house, which is always nuclear.” Groves offers no trite resolutions or hackneyed morals. She portrays the kind of insight that might really come from the mind of a teenager: “If I had to boil it down I would say that a parent’s two main jobs are trying not to get divorced and keeping their kids alive.”

The aim of Beloit Fiction Journal is to publish “the best in contemporary short fiction” and to provide a home for “traditional and experimental narratives.” Maybe this edition’s lack of experimental stories reflects larger trends or just the latest batch of submissions, but only one of the fifteen in this issue comes anywhere close to unconventional. This is James Brubaker’s glorious, “Malcolm Stewart’s ‘A Catalog of Spatial Anomalies,’ (Annotated by Wilt Rushau).”

Brubaker’s story is two stories, or maybe more, written as one. Narrated by a Dr.Baumann, the story is part pulp science fiction journey through an escalating series of celestial “anomalies.” These clouds and pockets cause the intrepid space explorers to have experiences ranging from the amusing (tasting only their favorite flavors), to the alarming (dying inside the abnormality, with resuscitation upon exit). Meanwhile, our fictional author’s story is annotated by his fellow (fictional) Sci-Fi writer and nemesis, Wilt Rushau. As the crew lurches deeper into the void, Rushau’s annotation moves from a critique of the narrative, to ad hominem attacks on Stewart, which may or may not be prevarications. This piece mixes several stories and unreliable narrators in an incendiary delight. The form of the story is also appealing; the annotations occupy a significant chunk of the page, so that Stewart’s narrative hovers like the shuttle pod piloted by Dr. Baumann across the cosmos. Brubaker’s work possesses a quirky self-consciousness: “Is it any wonder I count myself among the dozens of serious science fiction writers who are angry with Stewart for softening the genre?” “A Catalog of Spatial Anomalies” cooks up tasty with a tablespoon of pulp, a dash of literary criticism, and a full cup of literary fiction, while demonstrating that humor is also welcome at Beloit Fiction Journal.

If anything is lacking in this issue, it is a diversity of voices. Sure, there is plenty here about relationships, angst, and dark humor, but it’s mostly white and mid-western (I’m not talking geography). There is virtually nothing that speaks to the urban experience or the lives of gays or lesbians, or even people outside of the middle class. Mark Rigney’s story, “Ms. Henry in Rehearsal,” has an elderly narrator and rural scenes are represented here and there. However, BFJ is clearly not a publication that shies from any particular kind of voice, insisting only on the highest quality writing and proving it with the stories in this issue.

Recently I lost my cell phone and life without texting is a reminder of the pleasures of the pre-digital age (my wife’s opinion notwithstanding). Likewise, BFJ has an analog vibe that is congruent with its fiction-only quest, and is made for writers who pepper their speech with: “back in the day.” Submissions are accepted from August until the beginning of December, from one to sixty pages in length. That’s right – pages; no email submissions accepted. Send the editors a high quality piece of literary fiction, along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE).

In case my treatment of James Brubaker’s story confused you, bear in mind that BFJ does not publish genre fiction.

There’s a great recitation of BFJ’s history on their WordPress site (http://beloitfictionjournal.wordpress.com/), in which one of the original editors, Fred Burwell, describes the magazine’s origins and the desire of its founders to create a space where “only the quality of the story mattered.” This is precisely the space that Beloit Fiction Journal provides three decades later. These stories are meaningful and often painful, each possessing some of the redemptive qualities which we crave from art. It’s great to see an established journal chugging along at such a high standard and remaining true to the aims that first set it in motion. It is just too bad that Beloit Fiction Journal only comes out once a year.